Penn State Extension-Centre County provides this blog as a source of information to the central Pennsylvania forestry community.
Updates and news items on forestry related subjects are posted regularly.

Friday, November 14, 2014

How best to help Pennsylvania’s woods?

One of our very own Pennsylvania Forest Stewards, Nancy Baker, was interviewed by State Impact NPR recently. They wrote a very interesting story that I wanted to share with my readers. Nancy is a forest landowner in northeastern Pennsylvania in Bradford County. She is active in many forestry based organizations including the PA Forest Stewardship Volunteers and the Pennsylvania Forestry Association.

Changing climate changing forests: How best to help Pennsylvania’s woods
November 7, 2014
By Susan Phillips

In a 19th-century farmhouse deep in northern Pennsylvania’s Bradford County, Nancy Baker is looking at family photos dating back four generations.One shows her grandfather with a team of horses on clear cut land. Another shows her mother and aunt on the same farm as a small child. Baker also has a series of aerial photos going back to 1939, which show how the forest cover has evolved in the past 70 years.

Her home was built by her great grandfather, Joseph Morrow Gamble, a Scots-Irish immigrant who cut timber from the virgin forest and shipped it down the Susquehanna River. The story of how Baker’s family used its land to make a living was replayed up and down the East Coast after European settlers arrived. Her great grandfather cut down woods for timber. Then he turned to farming, yanking rocks from the stony soil to mark out cow pastures. His children inherited the land. But in the 20th century, their children left for better jobs in town. Baker’s own parents became teachers.

With the land left to itself, the forests returned. So Baker grew up playing in the woods and learning how to fell a tree ambidextrously with an axe.
“When we inherited this land from my mother I said, ‘OK, it’s our turn to steward the land,’” said Baker. “But how are we going to do this?”